Chapter 1: What is the significance of Emily St John Mandel's novel The Glass Hotel?
This is an ABC podcast. Hi, welcome to the Bookshelf on Radio National. I'm Kate Evans, surrounded by books as always, but coming to you from home this time, so you might hear the odd street noise and children. So Cassie, how are you? I'm good.
Well, I am pretty good, Kate. I'm still at HQ, still doing a daily program for ABC Radio Sydney. So I'm holding the fort for the bookshelf here in the studio.
But that also means, Cassie, you're having to deal with all of that policy and health news, all that frontline stuff. Does that make it harder or easier for you to turn to fiction?
Well, look, I think fiction is what we need now to get away from some of this stuff. But actually, I was thwarted this week. I had a coronavirus intervention in my reading because the book I was supposed to read this week just simply didn't arrive, Kate. So that was a bit of a downer.
Chapter 2: How does the coronavirus impact reading habits according to the hosts?
But these are such extraordinary times that we're experiencing that it is... pleasure and a privilege to be able to come to work and to feel like you're making some kind of contribution to the information flow. So there you go. There's my answer.
And even sitting here at home, I mean, I'm looking at my own bookshelves as we speak and thinking about, you know, which books are expansive, which ones deal with travel, which ones have big horizons. So there's all sorts of stories we can keep telling, discussions we can keep having about what fiction does.
Well, they do sound almost as thrilling as the JobKeeper stimulus wage package that I've been reading about this week.
But of course, we're going to keep on talking here on the bookshelf about new releases, about fiction and ideas. But we'll also, I think, do a bit of talking about rereading in the next few months and maybe the books you've been avoiding or those you've always wanted to get around to.
Yeah, great. So we do have some new books for you today. We were going to talk about Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet, which is the book that didn't arrive. But Kate, you've read it. You think it's fantastic. So I've said stop. I'm going to read it and then we'll talk about it next week. So that's what we're not doing. What are we doing in this program, Kate?
Well, today we have historical fiction about 19th century gold rushes. In Australia, there's Miranda Rewo's Stone Sky, Gold Mountain, and there's an American novel about gold rushes that we'll mention too.
And the global financial crisis in Emily St John Mandel's novel, The Glass Hotel.
Let's welcome into the discussion our first guest, Alex Tai. He's a journalist, a book reviewer and the very first recipient of the Mark Colvin Journalism Scholarship. Hey, Alex.
Hey, how are you going?
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Chapter 3: What themes are explored in Mirandi Riwoe’s Stone Sky Gold Mountain?
Except we do start with the image of the Glass Hotel, which is a hotel that's right in the wilderness of British Columbia, pretty much at the edge of the world. The walls are, as you can guess, completely made of glass and people can look out and see the still lakes and the quiet forests of British Columbia.
So it's a remote hotel. You can only get there by boat. So it's aimed at the rich. It's owned by a man named Jonathan Alcatis, who we don't actually meet straight away. But at various times, we do meet people who work there. We meet people who stay there.
So it is a connection through the novel, but it's not one of those architectural novels where everything centres around a building, but it's a hub for some of the action. And we begin by meeting a character named Paul, who at one point in the novel does work in the hotel. But we meet Paul in 1999. So what's happening in his life in that year?
Paul, he's a recovering drug addict and in 1999 he's managed to make a bit of a break for himself. He's studying at the University of Toronto but very unhappy about it. And to try and achieve a little bit of escape he starts going out to clubs and there's this one night where He is involved in pretty much an accidental overdose.
He kills a guy or is responsible for a man being killed by taking too many drugs. And after that, he drops out of the University of Toronto and flees.
And we learn a bit of his backstory. So this is a character who is overwhelmingly alone throughout the novel. But even as a child, his father had left the family for a younger woman. And his father and that woman had a child, a girl named Vincent. who he's really quite resentful of. And that carries on through into his adult life.
And it's that character, Vincent, who's actually much more important to the story than Paul is. So it feels as though Mandel is approaching the story from the side, sort of playing with us in terms of where our interests might lie.
That's true, and I'm glad that we do move away from Paul's story because it's pretty dark to begin with, and he's honestly not very likeable as a character. Vincent, however, is a very sympathetic character, and like you say, we meet her through Paul.
So paint us a picture of Vincent.
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Chapter 4: What makes C Pam Zhang's How Much of These Hills is Gold unique?
The first thing that we learn about Vincent is she lives at the edge of British Columbia, near where the Glass Hotel is going to be built. And we learn she has this tragic story. Her mother has drowned in those lakes that we heard about. We aren't sure at the beginning or even throughout the book whether or not it was a suicide or an accident, the mother drowning.
And that's where we find Vincent. But she is a character who just... goes through so many changes and transformations throughout this novel. She's the central character of the novel, which is, I say that hesitantly because it's a novel that has a lot of characters, but Vincent I think we spend the most time with.
And as you say, she goes through transformations and she's a chameleon who is aware that she knows how to adapt herself to different circumstances. And she's even a bit critical of herself about why she's doing this. What are the sort of ethics of moulding herself into a new circumstance?
But there's a strange incident early on in the book and at this hotel that helps bring into focus the other main character in the story, a money man, named jonathan al-qaeda so he owns the hotel and one day when he's due to visit someone graffitis the window with the words well what does it say and what happens
The words that are graffitied on the glass wall of this hotel are, why don't you swallow broken glass? And we learn that that message is intended for Alcatus through some circumstances. He doesn't actually see it. But when Alcatus arrives, he meets Vincent, who is working at the hotel along with Paul at this point in time. And Vincent starts chatting to Alcatus. Alcatis over a drink.
And you're right. Yes, Vincent, she is a bit of a chameleon. At this point, she sees this man walking in with so much money and so much charm. And she looks at him and she sees an opportunity.
And it takes hundreds of pages, Alex, before we ever find out what that piece of graffiti, why don't you swallow broken glass means. So we're given these funny little clues and not quite sure what's going on. But what we do follow is
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Chapter 5: What historical context is provided about the 19th-century gold rush?
is a relationship between this young woman, Vincent, and this much older, really wealthy man, Alcatis, who's an investor. And we're talking really big money, aren't we? So they become a couple and Vincent enters what she refers to as the kingdom of money. And so how does that play out? What sort of life is she living, Vincent?
Yeah, it's really interesting. When we talk about the amount of money that Alcatraz has, it's the kind of money that makes it possible for you to never think about money ever again. So Vincent, she essentially becomes Alcatraz's wife and goes and lives with him in this beautiful home in Connecticut, you know, maternity pool and a driver to take her into the city whenever she wants.
Her existence, I don't know, I don't really envy it despite all the money. She spends a lot of time walking around New York and shopping and she meets one woman who I guess you could call her another tourist in this kingdom of money. And they both realize that, you know, all of the shopping is boring, essentially.
Yeah.
And so we keep on meeting more and more people from this strange kingdom of the wealthy. And some of them just have stacks of money. And there's others, like a woman called Olivia, who was a painter and a former bohemian, who really only had a tiny bit of money. But she's doing okay because she invested with Al-Qaeda. Now, meanwhile, we start to pay attention to the dates. It's the 2000s.
We're getting later and later into the years. What are we moving towards?
So hang on, can I just backtrack for a moment, because this, unlike Emily St John Mandel's previous novel, which was a dystopian futuristic novel, this is a realist novel. And when is it set?
That's a really good question, Cassie, because this story moves all over the place. It opens in 1999. Then we get a back story in 1994. And then this whole kingdom of money line is happening in the 2000s. So we're moving towards what else? The global financial crisis. So St. John Mandel is interested, it seems, in moments when the world is in crisis. But this is a very different one.
This is a money crisis. And we keep on getting hints throughout the novel that things have gone wrong. And we're not even sure who the voice is, this sort of omnipresent voice who says, "'We could see it coming. We were watching things fall apart.'" And so we're getting hints that all is not going to be well in this smoke and mirrors and gold and platinum world.
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Chapter 6: How do the characters in The Glass Hotel navigate their challenges?
What did you make of the differences with this other book?
I find this book is very interesting. You know, they published it at the same time, and they also used the two siblings, one man, one woman. One is in San Francisco, one is in Queensland, and they all went through a very different life journey in a gold rush period.
And I guess one of the things that struck me as the difference between these two novels is that the American one has to address the whole idea of the American West and all the traditions of storytelling that go with the Western. And so these young people are trying to sort of work out how much they fit in with the mythology of America, which isn't quite the same story
sort of relationship to the national story as the things that Miranda Rewo is grappling with.
That's interesting. But I find the Stone Sky and Gold Mountain is really, I would like to say this book is really get us inside of the people's emotion. feeling in a gold rush period. So it didn't really talk much about a community and also a larger society if you compare American novel.
So their approach is quite different. And so that other novel, How Much of These Hills is Gold, is published by Virago. Mayfen, thank you so much for speaking to us on the bookshelf.
Thank you very much. Sounds like a new way to think about the gold rushes, Kate, especially a novel set in North Queensland rather than on the Victorian goldfields or New South Wales goldfields.
Yes, and it's also well worth reading a new piece of Australian fiction right now.
any time is the right time for new Australian fiction.
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